The Media’s Gleeful Christie Pile-On

Memo to Chris Christie: They hate you. If you don’t know who “they” are, you haven’t been watching the news or reading the papers.

Usually, it takes winning the GOP presidential nomination for a Republican media darling to experience such an onslaught of gleefully negative press coverage. John McCain was the straight-talking maverick right up until the moment he effectively clinched the nomination in 2008 — immediately triggering a thinly sourced New York Times report insinuating an affair with a lobbyist.

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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has gotten his disillusioning out of the way early, if he needed it. An occupational hazard of a certain kind of Republican is wanting to be loved by the wrong people. If the past week hasn’t cured Christie of that tendency, nothing will.

This is not to say that Bridgegate is, to use the left’s favorite term for any Obama administration scandal, “a faux scandal.” The abuse of power it involves is genuinely outrageous and, since Christie is a prominent potential presidential candidate, one that legitimately deserves national attention. But it isn’t Watergate or the Lewinsky affair. Christie is governor, not president, of New Jersey. At the very least, his aides acted foolishly and vindictively, but that hardly warrants coverage worthy of the onset of a major war.

At least the episode has given MSNBC a second purpose in its broadcast life. In addition to calling people racist, it now exists to obsess over Bridgegate.

Chris Hayes had an hourlong 11 p.m. special the other night. Perhaps Bridgegate, just as the Iran hostage crisis spawned the late-night news show “Nightline,” will spin off a new late-night MSNBC program devoted to investing inordinate emotional and intellectual energy in traffic-related political scandals.

In their Bridgegate analysis, Rachel Maddow and her fellow MSNBC-er Steve Kornacki have concluded that Christie aides may have sought to bring a $1 billion development abutting the GWB to a halt with a couple of rows of traffic cones. Hey, stranger things have happened, and we still don’t know the exact motivation behind the bogus traffic study. But so far, Maddow and Kornacki have failed to meet the most basic evidentiary standard of, you know, marshaling some evidence. They could just as easily speculate that Team Christie hoped to poison the entire population of Fort Lee with the fumes of idling cars.